


Page 13

by nyghtertale



Series: Decrypted Blood-Splattered Journal [4]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Episode Related, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-26
Updated: 2013-09-26
Packaged: 2017-12-27 16:39:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/981208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyghtertale/pseuds/nyghtertale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Welcome to assessment time in Night Vale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Page 13

Pigeons, like cats, come in a variety of colors. The pigeon diligently tapping at my bedroom window in the darkness of the early morning hours would’ve been called a paint had it been a horse: body the dirty white of roadside snow two days after snowfall, mottled with dirt-brown splotches. Its landing had triggered the pressure plates in the windowsill and my phone vibrated with the unread alert.

Pressure, movement, temperature, radiation, and ion particle sensors are standardly installed on all potential entrances and exits of homes owned by agents of a vague yet menacing agency. I’d replaced several key components with my own versions - you never knew when an official unofficial malfunction would occur and a cleaner team be sent to retire you - but it was my instincts that had woken me.

I am a light sleeper, by nature and by training; it is why I have survived while many of my opponents are gone. Killed, or forced into retirement after their photo splashed all over the internet. (Per company policy, I must officially condemn the meme of “Invisible Ninja” photos posted to social media sites as illegal and dangerous to interplanetary security. Ninjas work to protect us from the Demonic Legions and should be left in peace while invisible.)

A check of the alarm data indicated my pigeon visitor weighed twice the expected weight. Robotic, most likely. Or it had been eating Double Frosted Night Vale Cookie Crumble crumbs. The calorie count on them is unbelievably high. Headquarters maintained a flock evenly divided between natural and robotic mimicries, and sent them equally out on missions (as required by the Equal Avian Employment Opportunity law and the Robotic Overtime Abuse Prevention Act). 

The pigeon finished pecking its Morse code message, stared at me with black, potentially infrared camera beady eyes, and flapped off south. I felt a moment of sadness that I wouldn’t be returning to sleep, and got up to run the message through decryption protocols (set for waxing moon, message sent in first quarter of the day, transmitted from easterly direction, on a day with an ‘s’ in it).

I felt a lot worse when I finished. Four small words, but with a much larger impact: **Mid-Year Reviews Start Now**.

I didn’t say anything to my partner when she came down the next morning, dressed in cartoon polar bear pajamas. Some organizations grade on objective metrics: targets eliminated, regimes changed, illicit photos snapped of rich businessmen. And we have a section for that. But the most important assessment, the one that determines our bonuses and our promotions, is the comparison ranking to other agents.

So, I made small talk about the cereal and it’s milk absorption capacity, sent her back upstairs to dress, hugged her goodbye as she boarded the school bus, and never quite managed to share the message.

It turned out I hadn’t needed to.

In the late afternoon, after enjoying a long walk in the park on the far side away from the dog park, I got up from the bench and reached for my purse, which should’ve been slumped against my leg. But it wasn’t there. There was pressure against my leg, as if it were there, but when I cautiously patted the space my hand did not encounter faux-leather.

My purse was gone. My purse - with my emergency stash of bribery cash, with my high-amp taser and the micro-bugs I needed to plant along the street, with the PTA community play sign-up sheets! - was gone. Without the years of urban combat conditioning, I might’ve panicked. I might have, like an amateur, immediately set out to retrace my steps. Instead, I went to the bakery to plan my search-and-rescue op.

I’d ordered a turkey-and-swiss sandwich from them at lunch, so it was an excellent place to verify whether I’d had my purse with me at the time and used it to pay for my meal as I remembered, or whether that was a false memory implanted by the orange faction aliens. But there was something even more important for me to do first.

Sitting with a view of the passers-by, in case one wandered by with my purse, I took a pile of napkins and began sketching the people I’d encountered that day. Short-term memory is aptly named, and even the best recall can be distorted if not captured when fresh. If my memory were true, these sketches would serve as the basis of my witness list. If false, there would be clues in them generated by my subconscious.

I stepped into the bakery bathroom and ran through a quick check for injection marks as best I could in the cramped space. Both eyes tracked as I stared into the mirror and waved my finger left-right and up-down.

Talking to people is my least favorite method of gaining information, but sometimes lurking outside their windows or bugging their phones is ineffective. I walked up to the counter and smiled at the young man. “Do you remember if I was in here earlier? And did I have my purse? It seems to have vanished.”

“Oh,” he said, startled. “Did you maybe put the wrong dot on it?”

“Dot?”

“It’s dot day,” he said, and continued in a sing-song, “Red dots on what you love, blue dots on what you don’t.”

I flashed back to when my partner left for school that morning; the way she’d leaned into the hug. Had I felt a slight pressure, as of a hand pressing a sticker onto a purse?

“Thank you,” I told him, my smile not changing. I preferred to compete positively - we were both dedicated, loyal agents serving the same shadowy masters bent on ambiguous world-domination goals, after all - but if she wanted to play sabotage-style, I’d be happy to oblige. I stepped outside and looked up at the turquoise sky. “I’ll need several sheets of blue dot stickers,” I told a passing cloud (and the sheriff's secret police listening nearby).

Welcome to assessment time in Night Vale.


End file.
